(21 Jun 2022) This year’s data summarizes Web of Science™ citations from 2021, including 35,000 publications (journals, books and conference proceedings), 2.7 million citable items and 145 million cited references indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection™.
Two novel events drove the 2020 data: the inclusion of Early Access content in the JCR for the first time, and the sudden appearance of COVID-19 as an entirely new, extremely urgent field of study. These factors made the 2020 data explored in last year’s release particularly unusual. More journals increased in Journal Impact Factor (JIF) from 2019 to 2020 than in any other year-to-year interval across the last decade.
Analysis of the factors that created these striking changes showed that Early Access content contributed roughly 10% of the JIF citations. The remainder of the effect was traceable to a generalized increase in the volume of content published in 2020. The 2021 JCR contained over 25% more articles and citations than the prior year. These were not just articles about COVID-19, but the intensity of the research effort in the face of this global crisis was broadly observed by researchers in information science.
Read more from Clarivate’s blog here.
